Flint

I grew up just outside of Flint, Michigan.  In my childhood Flint was a very different place than it is today.  Flint is where the middle class in America started; the 1937 sit-down strike that unionized GM happened here.  It used to be a city of blue collar workers surrounded by the cooperate affluence of high level General Motors staff.  It created a city that was as gritty as the factory floor but as elevated as the first class city library, Planetarium and symphony orchestra.  It was a city fiercely proud of its place in the world and dedicated to improving the lives of its citizens.  All of that gets lost in the narratives coming out of Flint today that make it seem like it was always a failed city.  It wasn’t.

When the lead poisoning story hit the news, I was drawn to it for a variety of reasons.  For me, it was ‘home town’ story (I still watch the news from Flint just like I did as a kid).  But it also represented a story that had no specific place of origin, a story of the slow decline of an America of democratic values and economic opportunity that projected a sense of justice and righteousness.  Where had that Flint gone?  Looking back, it seems all but inevitable that the children of Flint would suffer lead poisoning at the hands of a Republican governor who valued a few dollars more that their health and future.  It seems inevitable that we would be treating parts of America like a third-world catastrophe unfolding on the news right in our back yard but feeling like it was coming from far away.  Flint was no accident perpetrated by a couple inept water employees or state bureaucrats.  It is the predictable, and I would argue intentional, consequence of decades of urban policy and abandonment.   

The shift started when Nixon chose war spending over continuing the anti-poverty programs of LBJ.  It started in the “southern strategy’ of Lee Atwater and Republican politicians milking the racial and class tensions that progressive change was starting to address.  It matured under Reagan and the ‘golden age’ rhetoric of the ‘city on the hill.’  Whenever politicians talk about the good old days in America, they are talking about the good old racist, misogynistic, elitist days.  The country of opportunity and economic justice is not part of our national narrative without unions.  That narrative starts in Flint.  Almost four decades of failed economic and social policy by mostly, but not only, Republican politicians have lead us to poisoning 9,000 children to save a few bucks.  It has lead us to this crossroads as a nation that has to now consider its legacy.

 The people of Flint didn’t choose this future; it was chosen for them.  It was chosen by cooperate greed and tax policies that allowed the greatest concentration of wealth in the hands of the fewest number of people in history.  A recent headline said that two-thirds of cooperation’s haven’t even paid taxes in this century.  Would the city of Flint have ever gone into bankruptcy if GM stayed and followed through on its promises or the tax base of the city wasn’t gutted with giveaways to robber barons?  We are here today because we failed to follow –up on what the workers in Flint created in the 30’s.  We bought into the dream of consumer capitalism that preached the only important part of production is what it costs in the end.  We failed each other by abandoning the commitment to a larger community of workers and their wellbeing.

The unions lost their way; they lost sight of the larger community.  We continue this folly every time we walk into a Walmart to save a few pennies and drive another stake into the heart of shared prosperity and economic justice.  We continue it by voting for politicians who promise to save us a buck or two on our taxes while sheltering trillions of dollars of cooperate wealth from taxes.  We continue it by supporting policies that demonize and abandon the poor, accusing them of draining public coffers, while the rich rob us blind.  Flint is the future of every city in America if this doesn’t stop.   If you get bogged down in the argument about who we should blame or that we just need to replace a few pipes, ask yourself this question – what if they were your children?  If we don’t change course, they soon will be.